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Here's a super-close-up of Kris Kobach's proposed first-year agenda for DHS under Trump.

Notice the bit about "______ Record Number of Criminal Aliens in the First Year" where that invisible first word is probably "Deport." Also notice the bit about defining "criminal alien" as any alien who has been arrested -- not convicted -- for a crime.

So, yeah -- local policing is where the Trumpian xenophobic rubber is gonna meet the civil rights road. No doubt there's a lot of cops in Seattle who will be more than happy to make a questionable arrest if the subject is sufficiently brown.

She's been fired, but she's appealing her termination to the disciplinary review board, which has the power to overturn the chief's decision and reinstate her as a police officer.

This disciplinary review board, by the way, is a 3-person panel stacked 2:1 with Seattle cops, and it only exists because the Seattle Police Officers Guild persuaded the city to create it as part of their collective bargaining agreement. All the more reason to abolish the DRB and tell the mayor (and city council, and city attorney's office) to quit making these types of concessions to the police guild.

An officer does not need probable cause to initiate an investigative stop. This type of pedestrian stop can be based on a very weak standard called "reasonable suspicion." Courts have defined reasonable suspicion as requiring an individualized (meaning specific as to whom), particularized (meaning specific as to what), articulable (meaning "just a hunch" doesn't cut it) suspicion that a person may be involved in, or about to be involved in, criminal activity of some kind.

In this case, if Wingate really was aggressively waving his golf club around, banging it on stop signs, and making the sort of threatening gestures that Whitlatch claims he was, she would have had reasonable suspicion to initiate a stop based on the belief that he might be up to various kinds of no good (reckless endangerment, harassment, property damage, etc.)

Practically speaking, the question of whether Wingate was really doing these things all comes down to the credibility of her word vs. his. Given that nobody else was reacting in alarm to Wingate, given that Whitlatch has contradicted herself - she thought he was threatening, but didn't initiate the stop right away and instead drove slowly around the block - and given that Whitlatch said he locked eyes with her in a menacing way while he was wearing large dark sunglasses, given Whitlatch's contemporaneous history of racially-charged cultural disparagement... All of this weighed against Wingate's apparently clear mind, harmless disposition, and consistent claims that he was minding his own business, looks very bad for Whitlatch and the constitutionality of the stop.

Rest assured, I've got plenty of attention to spare for SPOG's enablers in city government.

But for any horizon broader than the immediate case of the city of Seattle, running down every politician who ever made undue concessions to a powerful union is a losing game. To really solve the problem of police unions which, dare we say, pig out at the negotiating table, the law needs to provide the public with certain basic guarantees which cannot be bargained away.

The union's job, not unlike an attorney's, is to act in its members' best interests, within certain ethical bounds.

The difference is that when attorneys violate the ethical code of their profession, they actually get punished. But to a police union, punishment for ethical violations is just another chip on the bargaining table.

When this incident occurred in February of '13, it was still the policy of Seattle PD to interpret state law as prohibiting the release of in-car videos to the press and public. It took the WA supreme court until June 2014 to put an end to that policy by ruling in favor of KOMO TV in their lawsuit vs. SPD.

Then, after the June 2014 ruling, it was another year or so before a citizen activist stumbled onto the video sometime in 2015 (I think.) And it was only after that that the video was posted online and Essex Porter learned for the first time that the cop had accused him of disturbing the evidence, that he spoke up on Twitter and said (paraphrasing) "I most certainly did not."

All of which just goes to show how long it can take for this kind of nonsense to come to light, and why the city shouldn't agree to arbitrary time limits on serious matters like honesty and civil rights.

The members of the OPA Review Board obviously do not like their limited role. Ms. Secrest was even quoted as saying , "We are a toothless dog with no bark." If that is the way they feel, then I have some suggestions.

[snipped for brevity]

#4 Lastly, have your ideas for a "Tooth Filled Barking OPA Review Board" brought to the bargaining table. Everything is negotiable and it just depends on how much "kibbles and bits" that you will offer us. But here is another tip. You better go to COSTCO and get the really big bags!

There it is folks, from the guild president's own mouth. The same former guild president, by the way, who reportedly led the opposition to the recent contract that was voted down.